December 2002
Intermediate to advanced
260 pages
9h 18m
English
Content preview from Managing RAID on LinuxBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Controller Card BIOS
Like motherboards, most RAID controllers (and even many standard disk controllers) have an onboard controller BIOS. The controller BIOS performs many of the same tasks as the BIOS on a motherboard (such as low-level disk maintenance and configuration) and also provides an interface for configuring and managing RAID devices. While some manufacturers also provide user-space tools, you will need to configure the first array using the controller’s BIOS if you plan to install an operating system onto an array, and in some cases, even if you plan to install Linux directly to a standalone disk connected to a RAID controller.
If you are interested only in adding a new array to an existing system, and not in adding RAID support to your existing system disks (that is, you plan to keep your existing disk controller), you might be able to utilize user-space tools to configure and initialize arrays. However, not all vendors provide tools to manage controllers using Linux. Please see the specific controller sections later in this chapter for more information, or check with your vendor if you are using a controller that isn’t covered in this chapter.
Even if you have user-space tools available, you may wish to use the onboard BIOS to configure arrays. Vendor-provided management tools for Linux are often buggy and incompatible across different Linux distributions and versions (kernels, GUI toolkits, and libraries). Some simply provide WINE-compatible executables. WINE allows ...
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